Cognitive Robotics

Papers from the AAAI Workshop

Research in robotics has traditionally emphasized low-level sensing and control tasks including sensory processing, path planning, and manipulator design and control. In contrast, research in cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots and software agents with higher-level cognitive functions that enable them to reason, act and perceive in changing, incompletely known, and unpredictable environments in a robust manner. Such robots must, for example, be able to reason about goals, actions, resources (linear and/or non-linear, discrete and/or continuous, replenishable or expendable), when to perceive and what to look for, the cognitive states of other agents, time, collaborative task execution, and so on. In short, cognitive robotics is concerned with integrating reasoning, perception and action with a uniform theoretical and implementation framework.

The use of both software robots (softbots) and robotic artifacts in everyday life is on the upswing and we are seeing increasingly more examples of their use in society with commercial products around the corner and some already on the market. As interaction with humans increases, so does the demand for sophisticated robotic capabilities associated with deliberation and high-level cognitive functions. Combining results from the traditional robotics discipline with those from AI and cognitive science has and will continue to be central to research in cognitive robotics.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers involved in all aspects of cognitive robots, and discussing current work and future directions. While all aspects of cognitive robotics are of interest to the workshop, we especially welcome discussions and demonstrations of implemented systems, lessons learned from deployed systems in the real world, developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience relevant for developing more powerful computational models of cognition, and on the interplay of cognitive robotics with engineering fields such as control theory, mecatronics and modern sensing technologies.